Afrofuturism and Black Feminisms with Prisca Gayles, Ph.D.

Join Prisca Gayles, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Gender, Race and Identity at the University of Nevada, Reno, for a conversation on Afrofuturism and Black Feminisms, and how these concepts are woven into April Bey's Atlantica: The Gilda Region. 

 

In Atlantica, The Gilda Region, interdisciplinary artist April Bey creates an immersive installation that taps into Black Americans’ historical embrace of space travel and extraterrestrial visioning—a cultural movement dating back to the late 1960s and later termed Afrofuturism. Through this Afrofuturist lens, Bey reflects on subjects such as queerness, feminism, and internet culture in vibrant tableaux that combine plants, video, music, photography, and oversized mixed-media paintings and textiles.

 

 

Prisca Gayles is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Gender, Race and Identity at the University of Nevada, Reno. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Gayles investigates the role of emotions in transnational Black social movements with a broader research goal of understanding the diverse ways that blackness is politicized across the African diaspora and used as a tool to demand racial justice in spaces of black invisibility. Her current book project, Pain into Purpose: Mobilizing Emotions in Argentina’s Black Resistance Movement draws from a twenty-two-month ethnography to analyze how emotions permeate the macro- and micro- politics of Argentina’s Black social movement. This research has been funded by the Tinker Foundation, The U.S. Fulbright Program, a Gaius Charles Bolin Dissertation Fellowship at Williams College, and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Dr. Gayles’s research interests include Black Feminist Theory, Afro-Latin American feminisms, the sociology of race and ethnicity, Social movements, Migration and citizenship, and the African diaspora in Argentina. Currently, her work can be found in The Black Social Economy in the Americas: Exploring Diverse Community-based Markets (Palgrave MacMillan 2018), Hemispheric Blackness and the Exigencies of Accountability (University of Pittsburgh 2022) and the journals of Ethnic and Racial Studies, Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, and Gender, Place, and Culture.